Gate of the Sun

by

Translated from by

Published: January 2006

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ISBN: N/A

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  • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
  • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
  • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year

There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion. In Humphrey Davies’ sparely poetic translation, Gate of the Sun is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork.

— New York Times Book Review

 

Elias Khoury, along with Mahmoud Darwish, is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages. From this perspective Khoury’s work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell.

— Edward Said

 

Because the world is the way it is, because whole groups of people can be maligned, neglected, ignored, for too many years, we need the voice of Elias Khoury—detailed, exquisite, humane—more than ever. Read him. Without fail, read him.

— Naomi Shihab Nye

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Book Description

  • A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
  • A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
  • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
  • American Association of Publishers Best Book of the Year 
  • One of Kansas City Star’s 100 Noteworthy Books of the Year
  • Boldtype Notable Book of the Year
  • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year
  • Le Monde Diplomatique Book of the Year

Gate of the Sun: Bab al-Shams is the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. After their country is torn apart in 1948, two men remain alone in a deserted makeshift hospital in the Shatila camp on the outskirts of Beirut. We enter a vast world of displacement, fear, and tenuous hope. Khalil holds vigil at the bedside of his patient and spiritual father, a storied leader of the Palestinian resistance who has slipped into a coma. As Khalil attempts to revive Yunes, he begins a story, which branches into many. Stories of the people expelled from their villages in Galilee, of the massacres that followed, of the extraordinary inner strength of those who survived, and of love.

Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings to life the story of an entire people. Originally published in Beirut in 1998, the novel has been a sensation throughout the Arab world, in Israel, and throughout Europe.

There has been powerful fiction about Palestinians and by Palestinians, but few have held to the light the myths, tales and rumors of both Israel and the Arabs with such discerning compassion. In Humphrey Davies' sparely poetic translation, Gate of the Sun is an imposingly rich and realistic novel, a genuine masterwork.

New York Times Book Review


Elias Khoury, along with Mahmoud Darwish, is an artist giving voice to rooted exiles and trapped refugees, to dissolving boundaries and changing identities, to radical demands and new languages. From this perspective Khoury's work bids Mahfouz an inevitable and yet profoundly respectful farewell.

Edward Said


Because the world is the way it is, because whole groups of people can be maligned, neglected, ignored, for too many years, we need the voice of Elias Khoury—detailed, exquisite, humane—more than ever. Read him. Without fail, read him.

Naomi Shihab Nye


In Gate of the Sun a character dreams of writing a ‘book without a beginning or end...an epic of the Palestinian people,’ based on the stories of every village, and starting from the ‘great expulsion of 1948.’ Elias Khoury’s monumental novel is in a sense that groundbreaking book.

The Guardian (UK)


A vast canvas of the Palestinian exodus...Times, places, people, and massacres are interwoven. The tales crisscross as they are barely concluded in an anarchical delirium, a means for the author to sketch in the chaos of Palestinian history. But more than a struggle for remembrance, his novel is also an ode to those wives, mothers and sisters who nourish, rear, care for, and hope.

paru.com


Well researched, deeply imagined, expressively written and overtly nostalgic . . .

Publishers Weekly


The book leaves us with the overpowering sense that to tell a story in its awfulness and complexity — a story very largely of defeat — is to live to fight another day.

Jeremy Harding, London Review of Books


The word ”brilliant“ is etched across Khoury’s Gate of the Sun.

The Independent


This great, sprawling novel provides, as little else can, a window into the thinking of Palestinians, and a touching, powerful glimpse of their unique place in world history.

Amy Wilentz, The LA Times


For Khoury, those who live their lives enshrouded in death and political instability deserve a voice, and like few before him, he takes up their cause with a fearlessness that we can only marvel at, hoping that maybe in the near future, books like Khoury’s won’t have to be written.

Keenan McCracken, Music and Literature


Listen to Michael Silverblatt’s interview with Elias Khoury on Bookworm, 2006:

Read Part One and Part Two of an overview of Elias Khoury’s writing and the process of literary translation.

Read about Elias Khoury’s relationship to his writing from a talk called “Translating Palestine.”

Watch and listen to a conversation with translator Humphrey Davies and André Naffis-Sahely.

Read an interview with Elias Khoury about the relationship between an author and his characters.

Read about Elias Khoury’s discussion of the Arab Spring from a child’s perspective.

Listen to Elias Khoury in conversation with Chris Lydon of Open Source Radio in Cairo on November 15, 2012.

Read an interview and commentary on Arabic literature with Elias Khoury from .

Watch Elias Khoury give the keynote address at “Inverted Worlds” Congress.

 <a href="http://vimeo.com/57689837">http://vimeo.com/57689837</a> 

Watch a bit of a film adaptation of Gate of the Sun in Arabic.

http://youtu.be/1gbo-y-glIE

Listen to Elias Khoury being interviewed on KCRW’s Bookworm.

Watch a short film about the 2013 Palestinian Literature Festival.

Read a letter that Elias Khoury wrote to the villagers of Bab al-Shams, which was named after Gate of the Sun. 

Read Elias Khoury on the Israeli invasions of Lebanon in the London Review of Books.

Elias Khoury interviewed in Haaretz.

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